Planetary building blocks: What are they made from? When did they form?

Amy Bonsor

Cambridge University

As we detect more and more rocky planets around stars other than our Sun, in order to truly understand the nature of these planets, we need to know what they are made from. In this talk, I will discuss how white dwarfs that have accreted planetary material provide the perfect laboratory for studying the composition of planetary building blocks. Not only can they provide bulk abundances of key elements, such as Mg, Ca, Fe, Ni, Cr, but detailed analysis of the compositions reveal that some white dwarfs have accreted the iron-rich cores or iron-poor mantles of larger planetesimals. During this talk, I will highlight the key role these compositions can play in telling us when the first planetary building blocks formed, as well as discussing the importance of white dwarf - main sequence binary pairs as a test of how planet formation controls the composition of planets.

Date:	Thursday, 29 February 2024
Time:	12:30
Where:	Université de Montréal
	A-3521.1